categories
HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
entrepreneur journeys
Scaling a Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery Business in Silicon Valley: Axcient CEO Justin Moore (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Justin tried his hand in other businesses and never had the time to go back and finish his degree at Stanford. He learnt business on the job. Today, he has a thriving Disaster Recovery Cloud venture, for which he has raised over $60 million. The company
Winning Against Heavily-Funded Competitors: Al Lalani, CEO of Social Annex (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: You managed to get to $5 million in what time frame? Al Lalani: We’re past that stage now, but it took us about two to three years. Sramana Mitra: Who else in the competitive landscape was really giving you a hard time in deals in particular? Al Lalani: We were getting hit by the
Winning Against Heavily-Funded Competitors: Al Lalani, CEO of Social Annex (Part 4)
Al Lalani: The next phase of growth was primarily to scale some of the traditional SaaS channels. We hired an outbound marketing team to scale the people I hired from college and Craigslist. We created an inbound marketing team to do a lot of content marketing. If you look at our site, we’ve got really
Winning Against Heavily-Funded Competitors: Al Lalani, CEO of Social Annex (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: How did you acquire customers? What was the pricing model that you were using? Al Lalani: It was, plain and simple, cold-calling for the most part. It was really focusing on the niche of e-commerce. Within that niche, we focused on the mid-market. These are customers between $2 million to $50 million in online
Winning Against Heavily-Funded Competitors: Al Lalani, CEO of Social Annex (Part 2)
Al Lalani: I had hired a few developers in my first startup. I didn’t know what to do when I was losing money every month. I wasn’t making much on the e-commerce side. A friend of mine said, “I’m in a little bit of a fix. We need to build this site. I have a budget
Winning Against Heavily-Funded Competitors: Al Lalani, CEO of Social Annex (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. We often get this question: how do you compete with a bootstrapped startup against heavily venture-funded competitors. We’ve done other stories on this topic. Here’s one that will give you additional perspective. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you
Bootstrapping to $20 Million: Jagan Reddy, CEO of Leeyo Software (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: You have chosen to keep this bootstrapped until this point? Jagan Reddy: Yes. Sramana Mitra: What are your thoughts about that? You have a profitable structure. You must be getting tons of calls from investors, but it sounds like you have chosen not go in that direction. Jagan Reddy: We have spoken with
Bootstrapping to $20 Million: Jagan Reddy, CEO of Leeyo Software (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: How did that revenue split between large enterprises and SMBs? Jagan Reddy: About 75% of revenue is from large enterprises. Sramana Mitra: You said you had to increase your marketing to get into the SMB customers. What did you do in terms of marketing? Jagan Reddy: It’s more outbound. The only trouble in
